John Merrells
CPO/CTO at kea
Delray Beach, Florida
Overview
Work Experience
CPO/CTO
2023 - Current
AI Voice Agent for Quick Service Restaurants.
Advisor
2018 - 2023
kea empowers restaurants to operate more intelligently and own their relationship with customers.
Raised $17,000,000.00 from Superangel, Raj Kapoor, Streamlined Ventures, Tony Lam, Barrel Ventures, Marbruck, Craig Flom, Deepcore, Edward Lando and Pareto Holdings.
Mentor, EIR, Advisor
2014
Advisor
2021 - 2024
"Beat the Street" with advanced investment strategies, based on data-driven algorithmic trading of stocks and crypto.
Streetbeat is a B2B AI platforms Serving Wealth Managers and Brokers to increase revenues throw automation
Raised $15,000,000.00 from Evolution Ventures, TTV Capital, Seraph Group and AAF Management Ltd..
Advisor
2021 - 2024
Building a global marketplace for software engineers, because talent is everywhere and opportunity is not.
Andela's mission is to connect brilliance with opportunity.
Raised $381,005,800.00 from Generation Investment Management, Spark Capital, Golden Palm Investments, Whale Rock Capital Management, SoftBank Vision Fund, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Sweetwater Capital Partners.
Co-Founder, Board Member
2020 - 2023
Holonic builds product development teams for startups. We meet the resourcing needs of product and engineering leaders with fully cohered and aligned squads of product developers. Our team of experienced engineering, product, and people leaders has codified decades of team-building experience into a repeatable process for forging a group of software engineers into a high-performing product development team.
CPO
2019 - 2020
Sight Machine revolutionizes manufacturing operations to achieve continuous breakthroughs in productivity, profitability, and sustainability. We change the game for people who make things so they can improve people’s lives, their communities, and the environment. Our goal is to unlock the next level of efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability for a large part of the global economy.
Sight Machine provides analytics platform that helps address critical challenges in quality and productivity throughout the enterprise.
Raised $80,400,269.00 from Oreilly AlphaTech Ventures, Jump Capital, Sony Innovation Fund, E.ON, Mercury, Tekfen Ventures and LS Group.
Advisor
2015 - 2019
ALICE combines a first-of-its-kind construction planning platform with a powerful AI engine to help you digitize your firm's "way to build" and save big on any construction project.
Alice Technologies develops construction-engineering software for general contractors, subcontractors, and real estate developers.
Raised $61,513,075.00 from Page One Ventures, Swire Properties, WND Ventures, Gaingels, Future Ventures, Metaplanet, Rising Tide, GRIDS Capital and Merus Capital.
Advisor
2015 - 2019
Yotascale, a leader in cost management for AWS, provides intelligence and proactive, actionable insights to cloud operations, optimizing the infrastructure to meet business needs. Yotascale software uses AI to optimize cloud operations for reliability, visibility and cost savings. By using proprietary machine learning algorithms to process millions of data signals, Yotascale is providing contextually relevant, cost anomaly detection and recommendations that can be acted upon immediately.
Next-Generation Cloud Cost Management
Raised $24,600,000.00 from Aydin Senkut, Crosslink Capital, Felicis, Pelion Venture Partners and Engineering Capital.
Advisor
2015 - 2019
Architect of automated penetration testing system for web vulnerability scanning.
Advisor
2014 - 2018
While advising Shape, I designed a management system for its network of managed proxy servers. I wrote the product requirements and architected the system.
Shape provides defense against malicious automated cyber-attacks on web and mobile applications.
Raised $183,000,000.00 from EPIC Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Top Tier Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins, C5 Capital, JetBlue Ventures and Focus Ventures.
Education
Bachelor of Science - BS
1988 - 1992